Group items tagged

b) to artificially inflate the price and profitability of labour inputs

Things that in all previous eras of capitalism the elite desired to be as cheap as possible—to ease wage pressures—are now made as expensive as possible

capital migrates away from production and from private-sector services towards public sector services.

capitalism being replaced by a stagnant neo-feudalism

central bank, pumping money into the system

the state, propping up effectively insolvent banks

the migrant labour exploiter

the innovator someone who invents a way of extracting rent from low-wage people

But as soon as technology allowed it, we started to create organisations where the positive effects of networked collaboration were not captured by the market.

Wikipedia

Fortunately there is a third impact of info-tech. It has begun to create organisational and business models where collaboration is more important than price or value.

Linux

the platform co-operatives

The technology itself is in revolt against the monopolised ownership of intellectual property, and the private capture of externalities.

We must promote the transition to a non-capitalist form of economy which unleashes all the suppressed potential of information technology, for productivity, well.being and culture.

The strategic aim is: to reduce the amount of work done to the minimum; to move as much as possible of human activity out of the market and state sectors into the collaborative sector; to produce more stuff for free.

If the aim is for humanity to do as little work as possible, you can do it through three mechanisms. One is to automate. The other is to reduce the input costs to labour, so that we can survive on less wages and less work. The third is to push forward rapidly the de-linking of work and wages.

The city is where the networked individual wants to live

First—be overt. Help people to conceptualise the transition by actually talking about it.

Next—switch off the great neoliberal privatisation machine.

We know what it’s there for—to hand public assets to the private sector so that the profits of decaying businesses are temporarily boosted

The next proposal is more radical: model reality as a complex system.

Next—promote the basic income.

The basic income is an idea whose time is coming, because there won’t be enough work to go around. For me the basic income is a one-off subsidy for automation—to un-hook humanity from bullshit job creation and promote the delinking of work and wages.

However, it’s a transitional measure.

Next—actively promote the collaborative sector over the market and the state.

You have to understand the benefits of these entities are not completely measurable in GDP terms.

The building block is the co-op, the credit union, the NGO, the non-profit company, the peer-to-peer lender and the purely voluntary or social enterprise.

You have to promote new ways of measuring activity and progress.

Finally, understand and fight the battle over the externalities.

the state and eventually the commons should have first rights to all the data just the same as in a republic it owns all the land

Ultimately, however, the greatest good comes from the common ownership and exploitation of data, because it establishes the principle that this vast new information resource—which is our collaborative behaviour captured as data—is part of the commons.

Would capitalism collapse?

But you would attract the most innovative capitalists on earth, and you would make the city vastly more livable for the million-plus people who call it home.

No. The desperate, frantic “survival capitalists” would go away—the rip-off consultancies; the low-wage businesses; the rent-extractors.

All the other challenges would remain: the environmental challenge—not just low carbon but the preservation of quality living environments in a city sometimes deluged with visitors. Also the ageing challenge and the debt challenge.

a common platform for the left, for social democracy and for liberal capitalism

I could be completely wrong. But if I am right, it makes sense for all cities to ask themselves: could we become the first city to begin a demonstrable and tangible transition away from neoliberal capitalism, towards a society of high equality, high well-being, high collaboration?

the collaborative city, the city of participatory democracy, the networked city